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I'm reading all the ITIL V3 books. I will post some observations and notes as I go along. First up, Service Operations.

Good: We now have a request fulfillment process. Yes!

Better: The book clearly calls out the use of self-service portal.

Request Fulfilment offers great opportunities for self-help practices
where users can generate a Service Request using technology that links
into Service Management tools.

No so good: The book says the process starts with a service request, but service request is a process itself -- and it's implicit.

Never say die award: While Request fulfillment is a new processes, the book still tries to make it a kind of incident or pre-approved change process. What about just calling it work orders? A request may start because an incident, but they are a completely different processes; no need to make them an incident. Enough.

Best: Finally we have a unifying need for service requests that deal with access management! So access management and requests are tied.

Bester: And so is the automated provisioning of software and ID's and other goods.

More work to be done: It briefly mentions the need to tie Service Requests to the Portfolio; another time it ties to the Catalog but the book doesn't specify how services in a request catalog relate to the portfolio catalog -- only that they do. In other words, we need to tie the Request to the service, the service to a portfolio. I know how this needs to be done, but it's not in the book. The book says " Request fulfillment depends on ... The Service Portfolio, to enable the scope of agreed Service Request to be identified"

About time award: Financial approval is part of the request fulfillment process. This entails major changes as pricing is now part of the request process. This means modeling prices, tying it to GL codes, project codes, approval levels, and keeping prices dynamically update.

Call it out once and for all: The book describes self-help partly as follows:

Ideally, users should be offered a ‘menu’-type selection via a web interface, so that they can select and input details of Service Requests
from a pre-defined list –where appropriate expectations can be set by
giving target delivery and/or implementation targets/dates (in line
with SLA targets).

Just call it a request catalog and be done, no need to introduce another element!

Misguided: Trying to somehow bring the request fulfillment process as being central to the Service Desk. With Service Fulfillment needing to incorporate approvals, catalogs, pricing, finance and a linkage to the service portfolio, we defining a different system than a service desk -- this is the domain of the service catalog system.

Legacy thinking. Incident management is 16 pages. Service Fulfillment is 4 pages. The people who wrote this book have never worked at Starbucks. It's all about the request, baby.

Curious confusion. The book talks about request fulfilment. In American english, we'd say fulfillment.

I'm reading all the ITIL V3 books. I will post some observations and notes as I go along. First up, Service Operations.

Good: We now have a request fulfillment process. Yes!

Better: The book clearly calls out the use of self-service portal.

Request Fulfilment offers great opportunities for self-help practices
where users can generate a Service Request using technology that links
into Service Management tools.

No so good: The book says the process starts with a service request, but service request is a process itself -- and it's implicit.

Never say die award: While Request fulfillment is a new processes, the book still tries to make it a kind of incident or pre-approved change process. What about just calling it work orders? A request may start because an incident, but they are a completely different processes; no need to make them an incident. Enough.

Best: Finally we have a unifying need for service requests that deal with access management! So access management and requests are tied.

Bester: And so is the automated provisioning of software and ID's and other goods.

More work to be done: It briefly mentions the need to tie Service Requests to the Portfolio; another time it ties to the Catalog but the book doesn't specify how services in a request catalog relate to the portfolio catalog -- only that they do. In other words, we need to tie the Request to the service, the service to a portfolio. I know how this needs to be done, but it's not in the book. The book says " Request fulfillment depends on ... The Service Portfolio, to enable the scope of agreed Service Request to be identified"

About time award: Financial approval is part of the request fulfillment process. This entails major changes as pricing is now part of the request process. This means modeling prices, tying it to GL codes, project codes, approval levels, and keeping prices dynamically update.

Call it out once and for all: The book describes self-help partly as follows:

Ideally, users should be offered a ‘menu’-type selection via a web interface, so that they can select and input details of Service Requests
from a pre-defined list –where appropriate expectations can be set by
giving target delivery and/or implementation targets/dates (in line
with SLA targets).

Just call it a request catalog and be done, no need to introduce another element!

Misguided: Trying to somehow bring the request fulfillment process as being central to the Service Desk. With Service Fulfillment needing to incorporate approvals, catalogs, pricing, finance and a linkage to the service portfolio, we defining a different system than a service desk -- this is the domain of the service catalog system.

Legacy thinking. Incident management is 16 pages. Service Fulfillment is 4 pages. The people who wrote this book have never worked at Starbucks. It's all about the request, baby.

Curious confusion. The book talks about request fulfilment. In American english, we'd say fulfillment.

I'm reading all the ITIL V3 books. I will post some observations and notes as I go along. First up, Service Operations.

Good: We now have a request fulfillment process. Yes!

Better: The book clearly calls out the use of self-service portal.

Request Fulfilment offers great opportunities for self-help practices
where users can generate a Service Request using technology that links
into Service Management tools.

No so good: The book says the process starts with a service request, but service request is a process itself -- and it's implicit.

Never say die award: While Request fulfillment is a new processes, the book still tries to make it a kind of incident or pre-approved change process. What about just calling it work orders? A request may start because an incident, but they are a completely different processes; no need to make them an incident. Enough.

Best: Finally we have a unifying need for service requests that deal with access management! So access management and requests are tied.

Bester: And so is the automated provisioning of software and ID's and other goods.

More work to be done: It briefly mentions the need to tie Service Requests to the Portfolio; another time it ties to the Catalog but the book doesn't specify how services in a request catalog relate to the portfolio catalog -- only that they do. In other words, we need to tie the Request to the service, the service to a portfolio. I know how this needs to be done, but it's not in the book. The book says " Request fulfillment depends on ... The Service Portfolio, to enable the scope of agreed Service Request to be identified"

About time award: Financial approval is part of the request fulfillment process. This entails major changes as pricing is now part of the request process. This means modeling prices, tying it to GL codes, project codes, approval levels, and keeping prices dynamically update.

Call it out once and for all: The book describes self-help partly as follows:

Ideally, users should be offered a ‘menu’-type selection via a web interface, so that they can select and input details of Service Requests
from a pre-defined list –where appropriate expectations can be set by
giving target delivery and/or implementation targets/dates (in line
with SLA targets).

Just call it a request catalog and be done, no need to introduce another element!

Misguided: Trying to somehow bring the request fulfillment process as being central to the Service Desk. With Service Fulfillment needing to incorporate approvals, catalogs, pricing, finance and a linkage to the service portfolio, we defining a different system than a service desk -- this is the domain of the service catalog system.

Legacy thinking. Incident management is 16 pages. Service Fulfillment is 4 pages. The people who wrote this book have never worked at Starbucks. It's all about the request, baby.

Curious confusion. The book talks about request fulfilment. In American english, we'd say fulfillment.

Charlie, I agree. It's very high level and I wonder how useful it will be. When I look at the world of service definitions our customers engage in and this world, it seems like different planets. Link: erp4it: SML submitted to W3C.

I love the idea of a simple model to define services... I'm still puzzling whether this is it. If it is it, it's several years away from being useful. Also, I don't know why everything that ends up in the W3C seems so far divorced from reality. Must be me.

I sat through DCML standard effort, now part of Oasis, similar concept. I remember a 3 hour discussion trying to figure out what is a service. We also have CIM, similar idea but limited and not so great for services.

Sometime I wonder if there's a mathematical proof of impossibility that could be applied to some efforts. Something like "yes it seems like a neat idea, but it's impossible. Here's the math. So sorry about that. Move on."

Charlie, I agree. It's very high level and I wonder how useful it will be. When I look at the world of service definitions our customers engage in and this world, it seems like different planets. Link: erp4it: SML submitted to W3C.

I love the idea of a simple model to define services... I'm still puzzling whether this is it. If it is it, it's several years away from being useful. Also, I don't know why everything that ends up in the W3C seems so far divorced from reality. Must be me.

I sat through DCML standard effort, now part of Oasis, similar concept. I remember a 3 hour discussion trying to figure out what is a service. We also have CIM, similar idea but limited and not so great for services.

Sometime I wonder if there's a mathematical proof of impossibility that could be applied to some efforts. Something like "yes it seems like a neat idea, but it's impossible. Here's the math. So sorry about that. Move on."

Charlie, I agree. It's very high level and I wonder how useful it will be. When I look at the world of service definitions our customers engage in and this world, it seems like different planets. Link: erp4it: SML submitted to W3C.

I love the idea of a simple model to define services... I'm still puzzling whether this is it. If it is it, it's several years away from being useful. Also, I don't know why everything that ends up in the W3C seems so far divorced from reality. Must be me.

I sat through DCML standard effort, now part of Oasis, similar concept. I remember a 3 hour discussion trying to figure out what is a service. We also have CIM, similar idea but limited and not so great for services.

Sometime I wonder if there's a mathematical proof of impossibility that could be applied to some efforts. Something like "yes it seems like a neat idea, but it's impossible. Here's the math. So sorry about that. Move on."

"Finally and to keep it very simple, everything is about a user asking something to an IT department, with different levels of importance. From a new product to a new service, from a additional or new feature to a physical piece of hardware, allowing the business to be more efficient. "

Serge discusses the different kinds of "request" system that IT uses and the inherent confusion to users that results from having to figure out when it's a Project Request, a Change Request, a regular Request, etc.

In our experience at newScale, there needs to be a single place to manage all the demands of IT; users are not able to tell difference between the difference kind of requests.

This is the challenge that is best met by a request management catalog that can guide a user to the right kind of request, help them find, compare, learn, and then select what they need with a high-degree of confidence.

By the way, this service request catalog needs to be independent of the big four vendor suites. Why? Because it needs to connect to the help desk, change management, project portfolio management system, the HR system for organization data, the directory system for user login and registration. As it matures, it will be connected to a variety of provisioning systems, financial, procurement and even vendors. You can't use a closed system for your service request catalog. And we know the big four only integrate... with themselves.

"Finally and to keep it very simple, everything is about a user asking something to an IT department, with different levels of importance. From a new product to a new service, from a additional or new feature to a physical piece of hardware, allowing the business to be more efficient. "

Serge discusses the different kinds of "request" system that IT uses and the inherent confusion to users that results from having to figure out when it's a Project Request, a Change Request, a regular Request, etc.

In our experience at newScale, there needs to be a single place to manage all the demands of IT; users are not able to tell difference between the difference kind of requests.

This is the challenge that is best met by a request management catalog that can guide a user to the right kind of request, help them find, compare, learn, and then select what they need with a high-degree of confidence.

By the way, this service request catalog needs to be independent of the big four vendor suites. Why? Because it needs to connect to the help desk, change management, project portfolio management system, the HR system for organization data, the directory system for user login and registration. As it matures, it will be connected to a variety of provisioning systems, financial, procurement and even vendors. You can't use a closed system for your service request catalog. And we know the big four only integrate... with themselves.

"Finally and to keep it very simple, everything is about a user asking something to an IT department, with different levels of importance. From a new product to a new service, from a additional or new feature to a physical piece of hardware, allowing the business to be more efficient. "

Serge discusses the different kinds of "request" system that IT uses and the inherent confusion to users that results from having to figure out when it's a Project Request, a Change Request, a regular Request, etc.

In our experience at newScale, there needs to be a single place to manage all the demands of IT; users are not able to tell difference between the difference kind of requests.

This is the challenge that is best met by a request management catalog that can guide a user to the right kind of request, help them find, compare, learn, and then select what they need with a high-degree of confidence.

By the way, this service request catalog needs to be independent of the big four vendor suites. Why? Because it needs to connect to the help desk, change management, project portfolio management system, the HR system for organization data, the directory system for user login and registration. As it matures, it will be connected to a variety of provisioning systems, financial, procurement and even vendors. You can't use a closed system for your service request catalog. And we know the big four only integrate... with themselves.

I'm republishing this from earlier in the year because of the large amount of interest.

"What is the relationship between the Service Catalogue and the CMDB?" I have been
getting this question regularly in the last three months as more people travel the ITIL maturity curve. As practitioners move from Incident, Problem,
Change, Service Request to Service Level Management and Configuration, the
service catalog appears as the key link between these processes. But there's certainly a lot of confusion about how these concepts are
related and how to relate these systems operationally.

So over the next few postings
I will lay out the points of integration between the CMDB and the Service
Catalog, some of the issues I see with the CMDB vision and a prescriptive path to
put integrate the catalog and the CMDB. In these posting, I am less concerned with the purity of theory and more
with solving some very specific pains. Any comments are welcome.

Changes in Attitudes, Changes in Latitudes

As IT organizations from a
silo, domain centric model of managing IT infrastructure to a service centric
model, the big missing factor has been the lack of agreement and understanding
about what is a “service.”

This lack of definition
traditionally was not a problem, a service was calling the help desk. But with the growth of ITIL and ITSM
practices, the "service" is at the center of this process framework. It is a core element of Service Level
Management, Configuration management, and Change management. For descriptions of these terms see here and here.

For those who have attended newScale courses or work with newScale software, you know the very practical
definitions of a service we use in our catalog so I won’t repeat the definition
and structure but re-iterate that a service is always defined from the point of
view of a customer. (I was at a recent
Pink Elephant conference, listening to George Spalding, and he said “ITIL is
all about the customer. It’s the reason for implementing ITIL.” I wholly agree.)

At its highest level, the
service has four major parts, each with many sub parts and attribute. These for
major parts are: Offer, Request, Activities
and Resources.

There are many, many other
elements that make up the service definition; at newScale we refer to these
elements as the Service Catalog Reference Model. I will write more about this in the future.

Offer contains Service Levels, pricing, terms and conditions among other attributes.

Activities include all major IT processes such as Request, Change, Problem, Availability, Financial and Relationship management. As well as others like vendor management and provisioning as
well.

Resources include elements like vendors, or skills and labor and IT Systems.

IT Systems Resources are where
the catalog and CMDB link to each other. The CMDB is where an IT system model is kept based on all the
configuration items that make up that IT system.

Some vendors refer to these IT systems as
“Business Services” – I find that adds to the confusion and misunderstanding to
the definition of services. At best, a
discovery tool will only discover 50% of what you have in your infrastructure. The rest has to come from logical definition
that matters to a customer, that aligns with the enterprise business processes,
and that can be compared to offerings from external provider – that is the job
of the service catalog.

There are many non-discoverable
elements to the definition of a service for a customer, such as pricing,
support, delivery, billing, terms and conditions, and more. Add the need to publish
the catalog, manage the relationship, track agreements, and the “business
service” definition falls short of useful. I encourage people to use the more realistic definition of “IT
system.” Leave services to the catalog
and IT systems to the CMDB.

The service definition is a
central object in the IT organization and it needs its own source of record for
managing the service and customer lifecycle and the links to other relevant systems.
This source is the service catalog repository. The service catalog is the source of truth for what IT offers to the
business and consumers, the place where it’s requested, agreed, and
managed. It also should serve as the
source of record for planning, forecasting, and financial management. In this service catalog repository, there
aspects of the service that feed the CMDB and are in turn fed by the CMDB. The core CI's that the CMDB and the catalog
repository exchange is the “IT system” and its relevant sub-components.

Example: Web Hosting

Let’s imagine an IT
department that has a “service offering” of web-hosting at three different
levels Silver, Gold and Platinum. The
catalog would describe the service, what is included, the price or how is
charged and the rest of the elements from the Service Catalog Reference Model
that apply to this offering. (For the
specific template, see our community site) The service offering also documents all the
component services, including support, provisioning, maintenance, backup,
availability management, etc. And under
resources (“to-be provided”) it details the hardware, software, any configuration
recipe that is included in the service at a silver, gold and platinum
level. This notion of resources “to-be-provided”
is core to the service catalog but not to the CMDB. The CMDB will manage the
resources “as-they-are.”

Let’s say the marketing
executive needs a new website for a new marketing promotion. The executive or their
relationship manager goes to the service catalog and recommends: Web hosting,
Silver level, includes Linux, one rack, 1 gigabyte per month, at $200 per month
plus $100 per gigabyte of storage. The
executive agrees with the recommendation and enters into a hosting agreement
with IT.

This agreement now allows
requests for provisioning and configuration to be carried out such as ordering
servers, deploying licenses, granting access to users –the large variety of IT
service activities that are part of the bundled service offering “Web Hosting
–Silver” This ordering, specifying and provisioning process
is also part of the service catalog system. The service catalog software may need to tie to an inventory / asset system,
CMDB – to update and or provision the necessary systems and settings. It may also tie to change management and
other provisioning tools for managing delivery or to vendors who provided
underpinning services.

As the delivery process is
building the system through either a workflow system or change management
system, the CMDB CI’s are being added, or discovered and reconciled. The CMDB now has a new IT System that it will
track, and will report the main elements back to the catalog system. The CMDB will then keep the actual
consumption of storage and report it back as a subscription service being used
by the specific business unit.

Once the web-hosting service
is operational, the service catalog system plays a different role: Where before
the catalog was published and ordered a service offering, the catalog software now
manages a service agreement; where before it documented “resources to be
provided” it now links to the CMDB to show “resources being used and
consumed.”

Meanwhile, the marketing
executive can go to their service catalog portal and see all the different
services they have signed up for, the cost drivers, the service level
agreements and the history of requests and consumption that service has
undergone. The question of: “What does
IT do for me? What does it cost? How well does it do it?” disappears.

And when the storage group
needs to make changes in the SAN, they can see which IT system they are
affecting, what the SLAis, what business
process it is supporting, who to contact to notify, etc.

The catalog system will
manage the major changes to the service (in conjunction with the change
management tool) as additional services are added and negotiated. It will also
manage the lifecycle of that service– this is what is referred to as Service
Portfolio Management. The CMDB will also
be provides operational data that may be relevant for SLM and billing.

Who’s on first? What’s on second? Start with the Service Catalog

Now that we have a view of
how the CMDB and the Service Catalog relate, the question is where to start? The answer depends on the specific pain you
are trying to resolve and the level of maturity of your organization.

If you have persistent problems
keeping key applications available, then you have to solve that now and doing a
point solution CMDB may be the right thing—if your e-mail keeps going down, it
makes sense to deal with that first. ITIL is about customer centricity.

Yet for most organizations
it makes sense to start with the service catalog first that at least maps to an
inventory of applications. Think of this
as a first phase catalog. I will include elements such as descriptions, service
level options, included services, categories, etc. But it will probably not include all the
component services nor pricing or costs.

You need this first phase
catalog because the structure of your CMDB and the relationships need to make
sense from the perspective of a service. And a service is always defined from
the point of view of a customer. So
defining your services has to come first. This will drive the structure of meaningful relationships which will be
updated in the CMDB.

Trying to create the
service from the configuration items upward will not work. It’s like trying to construct a meal for a
restaurant by documenting the relationship between kitchen appliances—it will
not succeed. You start with a menu of
offerings (your catalog), which then drive the procurement of ingredients, the assembly
of recipes, and infrastructure of the kitchen.

The benefits of starting
with a service catalog are several:

First, it will make your
CMDB project more relevant and visible to the business because you will be able
to paint a picture that aligns with their concerns in a language they can
understand.

Second, it will reduce the amount
of work you have to do because you can focus on high impact services first that
affect your most important customers. Rather than trying to reconcile thousands
of CI’s and attributes, you can start with business view of the service and
focus on just those aspects that are relevant.

Third, the goal of the CMDB
is reduce down time in operations by showing relationships between different
items before changes happen. But
downtime is also reduced if we can drive down the number of major changes to
the infrastructure and are able to make changes recurrent. This is driven by
standardization. And the service catalog is the central enabler to standardize
what IT offers. Standardization will
reduce your costs, and increase your overall systems availability. If you look at ITIL, we normally want to have
different types of changes, common names for these are: pre-approved, standard
and major. By standardizing services you
can move more services from major or standard to pre-approved.

Fourth, implementing a
catalog first will reduce your project risk. An enterprise CMDB project is a multi-year effort; thus it could devolve
into a very IT-Centric technical project which by the time it’s complete does
not align to the services the customers care about. Starting with the service catalog, ensures
that the CMDB project remains aligned with the customer’s concerns.

Finally, there’s the issue
of compliance and financial reporting to consider. SOX and its assorted ilk are bringing a new
view to IT: risk management. In the next
few months, a nice person will step into your CFO’s office asking for some
simple reports – stuff that surely is already under available. Your CFO will say, “no problem go talk to … “ You? Your
boss? They will be an auditor asking for documentation of which businesses
consume what services and what resources support those services and how the
costs are accounted for. They will be
concerned with how costs are allocated depending on service consumption; is a
business unit underpaying to make results look good? And they will want to understand risk as
well. The service catalog will be the
key lens through which what IT does will be viewed.

I'm republishing this from earlier in the year because of the large amount of interest.

"What is the relationship between the Service Catalogue and the CMDB?" I have been
getting this question regularly in the last three months as more people travel the ITIL maturity curve. As practitioners move from Incident, Problem,
Change, Service Request to Service Level Management and Configuration, the
service catalog appears as the key link between these processes. But there's certainly a lot of confusion about how these concepts are
related and how to relate these systems operationally.

So over the next few postings
I will lay out the points of integration between the CMDB and the Service
Catalog, some of the issues I see with the CMDB vision and a prescriptive path to
put integrate the catalog and the CMDB. In these posting, I am less concerned with the purity of theory and more
with solving some very specific pains. Any comments are welcome.

Changes in Attitudes, Changes in Latitudes

As IT organizations from a
silo, domain centric model of managing IT infrastructure to a service centric
model, the big missing factor has been the lack of agreement and understanding
about what is a “service.”

This lack of definition
traditionally was not a problem, a service was calling the help desk. But with the growth of ITIL and ITSM
practices, the "service" is at the center of this process framework. It is a core element of Service Level
Management, Configuration management, and Change management. For descriptions of these terms see here and here.

For those who have attended newScale courses or work with newScale software, you know the very practical
definitions of a service we use in our catalog so I won’t repeat the definition
and structure but re-iterate that a service is always defined from the point of
view of a customer. (I was at a recent
Pink Elephant conference, listening to George Spalding, and he said “ITIL is
all about the customer. It’s the reason for implementing ITIL.” I wholly agree.)

At its highest level, the
service has four major parts, each with many sub parts and attribute. These for
major parts are: Offer, Request, Activities
and Resources.

There are many, many other
elements that make up the service definition; at newScale we refer to these
elements as the Service Catalog Reference Model. I will write more about this in the future.

Offer contains Service Levels, pricing, terms and conditions among other attributes.

Activities include all major IT processes such as Request, Change, Problem, Availability, Financial and Relationship management. As well as others like vendor management and provisioning as
well.

Resources include elements like vendors, or skills and labor and IT Systems.

IT Systems Resources are where
the catalog and CMDB link to each other. The CMDB is where an IT system model is kept based on all the
configuration items that make up that IT system.

Some vendors refer to these IT systems as
“Business Services” – I find that adds to the confusion and misunderstanding to
the definition of services. At best, a
discovery tool will only discover 50% of what you have in your infrastructure. The rest has to come from logical definition
that matters to a customer, that aligns with the enterprise business processes,
and that can be compared to offerings from external provider – that is the job
of the service catalog.

There are many non-discoverable
elements to the definition of a service for a customer, such as pricing,
support, delivery, billing, terms and conditions, and more. Add the need to publish
the catalog, manage the relationship, track agreements, and the “business
service” definition falls short of useful. I encourage people to use the more realistic definition of “IT
system.” Leave services to the catalog
and IT systems to the CMDB.

The service definition is a
central object in the IT organization and it needs its own source of record for
managing the service and customer lifecycle and the links to other relevant systems.
This source is the service catalog repository. The service catalog is the source of truth for what IT offers to the
business and consumers, the place where it’s requested, agreed, and
managed. It also should serve as the
source of record for planning, forecasting, and financial management. In this service catalog repository, there
aspects of the service that feed the CMDB and are in turn fed by the CMDB. The core CI's that the CMDB and the catalog
repository exchange is the “IT system” and its relevant sub-components.

Example: Web Hosting

Let’s imagine an IT
department that has a “service offering” of web-hosting at three different
levels Silver, Gold and Platinum. The
catalog would describe the service, what is included, the price or how is
charged and the rest of the elements from the Service Catalog Reference Model
that apply to this offering. (For the
specific template, see our community site) The service offering also documents all the
component services, including support, provisioning, maintenance, backup,
availability management, etc. And under
resources (“to-be provided”) it details the hardware, software, any configuration
recipe that is included in the service at a silver, gold and platinum
level. This notion of resources “to-be-provided”
is core to the service catalog but not to the CMDB. The CMDB will manage the
resources “as-they-are.”

Let’s say the marketing
executive needs a new website for a new marketing promotion. The executive or their
relationship manager goes to the service catalog and recommends: Web hosting,
Silver level, includes Linux, one rack, 1 gigabyte per month, at $200 per month
plus $100 per gigabyte of storage. The
executive agrees with the recommendation and enters into a hosting agreement
with IT.

This agreement now allows
requests for provisioning and configuration to be carried out such as ordering
servers, deploying licenses, granting access to users –the large variety of IT
service activities that are part of the bundled service offering “Web Hosting
–Silver” This ordering, specifying and provisioning process
is also part of the service catalog system. The service catalog software may need to tie to an inventory / asset system,
CMDB – to update and or provision the necessary systems and settings. It may also tie to change management and
other provisioning tools for managing delivery or to vendors who provided
underpinning services.

As the delivery process is
building the system through either a workflow system or change management
system, the CMDB CI’s are being added, or discovered and reconciled. The CMDB now has a new IT System that it will
track, and will report the main elements back to the catalog system. The CMDB will then keep the actual
consumption of storage and report it back as a subscription service being used
by the specific business unit.

Once the web-hosting service
is operational, the service catalog system plays a different role: Where before
the catalog was published and ordered a service offering, the catalog software now
manages a service agreement; where before it documented “resources to be
provided” it now links to the CMDB to show “resources being used and
consumed.”

Meanwhile, the marketing
executive can go to their service catalog portal and see all the different
services they have signed up for, the cost drivers, the service level
agreements and the history of requests and consumption that service has
undergone. The question of: “What does
IT do for me? What does it cost? How well does it do it?” disappears.

And when the storage group
needs to make changes in the SAN, they can see which IT system they are
affecting, what the SLAis, what business
process it is supporting, who to contact to notify, etc.

The catalog system will
manage the major changes to the service (in conjunction with the change
management tool) as additional services are added and negotiated. It will also
manage the lifecycle of that service– this is what is referred to as Service
Portfolio Management. The CMDB will also
be provides operational data that may be relevant for SLM and billing.

Who’s on first? What’s on second? Start with the Service Catalog

Now that we have a view of
how the CMDB and the Service Catalog relate, the question is where to start? The answer depends on the specific pain you
are trying to resolve and the level of maturity of your organization.

If you have persistent problems
keeping key applications available, then you have to solve that now and doing a
point solution CMDB may be the right thing—if your e-mail keeps going down, it
makes sense to deal with that first. ITIL is about customer centricity.

Yet for most organizations
it makes sense to start with the service catalog first that at least maps to an
inventory of applications. Think of this
as a first phase catalog. I will include elements such as descriptions, service
level options, included services, categories, etc. But it will probably not include all the
component services nor pricing or costs.

You need this first phase
catalog because the structure of your CMDB and the relationships need to make
sense from the perspective of a service. And a service is always defined from
the point of view of a customer. So
defining your services has to come first. This will drive the structure of meaningful relationships which will be
updated in the CMDB.

Trying to create the
service from the configuration items upward will not work. It’s like trying to construct a meal for a
restaurant by documenting the relationship between kitchen appliances—it will
not succeed. You start with a menu of
offerings (your catalog), which then drive the procurement of ingredients, the assembly
of recipes, and infrastructure of the kitchen.

The benefits of starting
with a service catalog are several:

First, it will make your
CMDB project more relevant and visible to the business because you will be able
to paint a picture that aligns with their concerns in a language they can
understand.

Second, it will reduce the amount
of work you have to do because you can focus on high impact services first that
affect your most important customers. Rather than trying to reconcile thousands
of CI’s and attributes, you can start with business view of the service and
focus on just those aspects that are relevant.

Third, the goal of the CMDB
is reduce down time in operations by showing relationships between different
items before changes happen. But
downtime is also reduced if we can drive down the number of major changes to
the infrastructure and are able to make changes recurrent. This is driven by
standardization. And the service catalog is the central enabler to standardize
what IT offers. Standardization will
reduce your costs, and increase your overall systems availability. If you look at ITIL, we normally want to have
different types of changes, common names for these are: pre-approved, standard
and major. By standardizing services you
can move more services from major or standard to pre-approved.

Fourth, implementing a
catalog first will reduce your project risk. An enterprise CMDB project is a multi-year effort; thus it could devolve
into a very IT-Centric technical project which by the time it’s complete does
not align to the services the customers care about. Starting with the service catalog, ensures
that the CMDB project remains aligned with the customer’s concerns.

Finally, there’s the issue
of compliance and financial reporting to consider. SOX and its assorted ilk are bringing a new
view to IT: risk management. In the next
few months, a nice person will step into your CFO’s office asking for some
simple reports – stuff that surely is already under available. Your CFO will say, “no problem go talk to … “ You? Your
boss? They will be an auditor asking for documentation of which businesses
consume what services and what resources support those services and how the
costs are accounted for. They will be
concerned with how costs are allocated depending on service consumption; is a
business unit underpaying to make results look good? And they will want to understand risk as
well. The service catalog will be the
key lens through which what IT does will be viewed.

A serviceportfolio
describes services in business value terms, specifying what the
services are, how they're bundled or packaged, and what benefits they
deliver. It's articulated from the customer's perspective and answers
the questions, "Why should I buy this service?" and "Why should I buy it from my internal provider rather than an external service provider (ESP)?" A serviceportfolio
is product-, process- and platform-neutral. As such, it's an important
communication and relationship management tool. When created correctly,
it also becomes a vital decision framework. A serviceportfolio
that is stated in customer terms is also, by definition, stated in
market terms, providing the means for assessing the IT organization's
competitiveness relative to ESPs.

Bottom line: You have to establish a value proposition for your services.

Translated into english,

You have to tell your customer why the service is valuable to them in their work, tell it in a way that distinguishes it from competing offers, tell it so it makes sense to them given their concerns and worries, and describe the MOST important detail that makes your offer better than other people's offer. Oh. ... And tell me the most important elements of the service that I'm getting.

Wheeeew u. That's long, but it's what the service definition needs to have.

A serviceportfolio
describes services in business value terms, specifying what the
services are, how they're bundled or packaged, and what benefits they
deliver. It's articulated from the customer's perspective and answers
the questions, "Why should I buy this service?" and "Why should I buy it from my internal provider rather than an external service provider (ESP)?" A serviceportfolio
is product-, process- and platform-neutral. As such, it's an important
communication and relationship management tool. When created correctly,
it also becomes a vital decision framework. A serviceportfolio
that is stated in customer terms is also, by definition, stated in
market terms, providing the means for assessing the IT organization's
competitiveness relative to ESPs.

Bottom line: You have to establish a value proposition for your services.

Translated into english,

You have to tell your customer why the service is valuable to them in their work, tell it in a way that distinguishes it from competing offers, tell it so it makes sense to them given their concerns and worries, and describe the MOST important detail that makes your offer better than other people's offer. Oh. ... And tell me the most important elements of the service that I'm getting.

Wheeeew u. That's long, but it's what the service definition needs to have.

A serviceportfolio
describes services in business value terms, specifying what the
services are, how they're bundled or packaged, and what benefits they
deliver. It's articulated from the customer's perspective and answers
the questions, "Why should I buy this service?" and "Why should I buy it from my internal provider rather than an external service provider (ESP)?" A serviceportfolio
is product-, process- and platform-neutral. As such, it's an important
communication and relationship management tool. When created correctly,
it also becomes a vital decision framework. A serviceportfolio
that is stated in customer terms is also, by definition, stated in
market terms, providing the means for assessing the IT organization's
competitiveness relative to ESPs.

Bottom line: You have to establish a value proposition for your services.

Translated into english,

You have to tell your customer why the service is valuable to them in their work, tell it in a way that distinguishes it from competing offers, tell it so it makes sense to them given their concerns and worries, and describe the MOST important detail that makes your offer better than other people's offer. Oh. ... And tell me the most important elements of the service that I'm getting.

Wheeeew u. That's long, but it's what the service definition needs to have.

Looking at ITIL V3 goals, Service Requests -- the forgotten step child of Incident, Problem and Change -- finally have their own structure. I can't wait to get more details. If you have links, post them in comments. This is a topic that I will revisit quite a bit. Heres' the quote.

"In V2, service requests were included as part of the incident management life cycle. In V3 they are not. Service request will now be a function included as part of 'request management' on its own that ties to the change management process. The need to log service requests through a single point of contact as you would today in V2 is still there, however, you may choose to manage them in a different way, perhaps as a part of an enhanced change model that deals with service requests as standard changes."

Looking at ITIL V3 goals, Service Requests -- the forgotten step child of Incident, Problem and Change -- finally have their own structure. I can't wait to get more details. If you have links, post them in comments. This is a topic that I will revisit quite a bit. Heres' the quote.

"In V2, service requests were included as part of the incident management life cycle. In V3 they are not. Service request will now be a function included as part of 'request management' on its own that ties to the change management process. The need to log service requests through a single point of contact as you would today in V2 is still there, however, you may choose to manage them in a different way, perhaps as a part of an enhanced change model that deals with service requests as standard changes."

Looking at ITIL V3 goals, Service Requests -- the forgotten step child of Incident, Problem and Change -- finally have their own structure. I can't wait to get more details. If you have links, post them in comments. This is a topic that I will revisit quite a bit. Heres' the quote.

"In V2, service requests were included as part of the incident management life cycle. In V3 they are not. Service request will now be a function included as part of 'request management' on its own that ties to the change management process. The need to log service requests through a single point of contact as you would today in V2 is still there, however, you may choose to manage them in a different way, perhaps as a part of an enhanced change model that deals with service requests as standard changes."

IT services themselves can be bundles of other IT services. A perfect example is the workplace service of “new employee set up;” it may have a number of service components like employee orientation, e-mail, network access, and a new desktop computer. But the desktop computer can be a service by itself and also contain service components, such as: asset management, support services, security, etc.

Another example is e-mail accounts that consume storage. This may have a storage management service to provision, maintain, backup and restore, as part of the e-mail service. Additionally a “request restore” is also a separate service.

Are all services orderable? The answer is depends on who is the customer! Remember one of the characteristics of a service is to abstract complexity for our customer. But we have different customers (more on this another time).

Some services are directly consumable by just about anyone in the enterprise, such as network access (which needs to include adding and removing network ID’s). We call these entitlement services—everyone gets them. Often these represent our high volume of requests.

Others services are only available to specialized communities or market segments. Storage services tend to be services that IT provides to other IT groups, and not directly to employees—with few exceptions, like adding more storage to your e-mail account. There’s a large number of IT infrastructure services where the customer is the application development organization.

Finally there’s a class of services which are mandatory; these too have a life-cycle in that someone requested them at one point, but they remain mandatory until further notice. These services are part of the overhead of running IT and need to be included to develop a true activity-based cost for a service. Some examples of these services are capacity planning, relationship management, business continuity management, compliance management and security management.

In offering e-mail services, these types of services are implicit. There are excellent reasons to hide these entirely. But there are also excellent reasons to show them. What are the rules?

Hide a service component if:

The costs of the service is minimal; there's no need to name every aspect of a product down to the cost of cellophane

The service costs is highly fixed and will need to be allocated.

It’s a controversial for the customer to pay for the service.

For example, the customer may not want pay for relationship management nor for human resource management—it’s just part of the overhead.

Show a service in the bundle if:

The cost is a meaningful percentage of the overall service cost,

The cost is variable through consumption

Showing the component service addresses a frequent question or common concern the customer may have

A competitor or external service provider includes it as an optional service in their offering

Calling it out will help you explain better your differentiation from a competitor

It's required by law, regulation or compliance.

For example, in e-mail services, as of this writing virus protection is standard, but still new, while spam filtering is not yet widely adopted so calling out spam filtering important to e-mail. The same applies to storage since it’s a variable cost to e-mail, and finally compliance management and any record retention services you may need to provide. The latter will add to the cost of the service; calling them out helps explain why the costs is higher than a generic e-mail service.

IT services themselves can be bundles of other IT services. A perfect example is the workplace service of “new employee set up;” it may have a number of service components like employee orientation, e-mail, network access, and a new desktop computer. But the desktop computer can be a service by itself and also contain service components, such as: asset management, support services, security, etc.

Another example is e-mail accounts that consume storage. This may have a storage management service to provision, maintain, backup and restore, as part of the e-mail service. Additionally a “request restore” is also a separate service.

Are all services orderable? The answer is depends on who is the customer! Remember one of the characteristics of a service is to abstract complexity for our customer. But we have different customers (more on this another time).

Some services are directly consumable by just about anyone in the enterprise, such as network access (which needs to include adding and removing network ID’s). We call these entitlement services—everyone gets them. Often these represent our high volume of requests.

Others services are only available to specialized communities or market segments. Storage services tend to be services that IT provides to other IT groups, and not directly to employees—with few exceptions, like adding more storage to your e-mail account. There’s a large number of IT infrastructure services where the customer is the application development organization.

Finally there’s a class of services which are mandatory; these too have a life-cycle in that someone requested them at one point, but they remain mandatory until further notice. These services are part of the overhead of running IT and need to be included to develop a true activity-based cost for a service. Some examples of these services are capacity planning, relationship management, business continuity management, compliance management and security management.

In offering e-mail services, these types of services are implicit. There are excellent reasons to hide these entirely. But there are also excellent reasons to show them. What are the rules?

Hide a service component if:

The costs of the service is minimal; there's no need to name every aspect of a product down to the cost of cellophane

The service costs is highly fixed and will need to be allocated.

It’s a controversial for the customer to pay for the service.

For example, the customer may not want pay for relationship management nor for human resource management—it’s just part of the overhead.

Show a service in the bundle if:

The cost is a meaningful percentage of the overall service cost,

The cost is variable through consumption

Showing the component service addresses a frequent question or common concern the customer may have

A competitor or external service provider includes it as an optional service in their offering

Calling it out will help you explain better your differentiation from a competitor

It's required by law, regulation or compliance.

For example, in e-mail services, as of this writing virus protection is standard, but still new, while spam filtering is not yet widely adopted so calling out spam filtering important to e-mail. The same applies to storage since it’s a variable cost to e-mail, and finally compliance management and any record retention services you may need to provide. The latter will add to the cost of the service; calling them out helps explain why the costs is higher than a generic e-mail service.

IT services themselves can be bundles of other IT services. A perfect example is the workplace service of “new employee set up;” it may have a number of service components like employee orientation, e-mail, network access, and a new desktop computer. But the desktop computer can be a service by itself and also contain service components, such as: asset management, support services, security, etc.

Another example is e-mail accounts that consume storage. This may have a storage management service to provision, maintain, backup and restore, as part of the e-mail service. Additionally a “request restore” is also a separate service.

Are all services orderable? The answer is depends on who is the customer! Remember one of the characteristics of a service is to abstract complexity for our customer. But we have different customers (more on this another time).

Some services are directly consumable by just about anyone in the enterprise, such as network access (which needs to include adding and removing network ID’s). We call these entitlement services—everyone gets them. Often these represent our high volume of requests.

Others services are only available to specialized communities or market segments. Storage services tend to be services that IT provides to other IT groups, and not directly to employees—with few exceptions, like adding more storage to your e-mail account. There’s a large number of IT infrastructure services where the customer is the application development organization.

Finally there’s a class of services which are mandatory; these too have a life-cycle in that someone requested them at one point, but they remain mandatory until further notice. These services are part of the overhead of running IT and need to be included to develop a true activity-based cost for a service. Some examples of these services are capacity planning, relationship management, business continuity management, compliance management and security management.

In offering e-mail services, these types of services are implicit. There are excellent reasons to hide these entirely. But there are also excellent reasons to show them. What are the rules?

Hide a service component if:

The costs of the service is minimal; there's no need to name every aspect of a product down to the cost of cellophane

The service costs is highly fixed and will need to be allocated.

It’s a controversial for the customer to pay for the service.

For example, the customer may not want pay for relationship management nor for human resource management—it’s just part of the overhead.

Show a service in the bundle if:

The cost is a meaningful percentage of the overall service cost,

The cost is variable through consumption

Showing the component service addresses a frequent question or common concern the customer may have

A competitor or external service provider includes it as an optional service in their offering

Calling it out will help you explain better your differentiation from a competitor

It's required by law, regulation or compliance.

For example, in e-mail services, as of this writing virus protection is standard, but still new, while spam filtering is not yet widely adopted so calling out spam filtering important to e-mail. The same applies to storage since it’s a variable cost to e-mail, and finally compliance management and any record retention services you may need to provide. The latter will add to the cost of the service; calling them out helps explain why the costs is higher than a generic e-mail service.

Continuing with our book excerpt....Our definition of the term service

For our purpose we need to define the word “service” as a term of art:

Service is the coordinated performance of one or more “activities” by one or more people on behalf of somebody else for their benefit.

Throughout the book, we will refer to restaurants and electric utilities as examples – if our definitions fit those two disparate service business as well as IT services, then we can safely assume the definition is generally applicable.

A restaurant is in the food service business. We go to a restaurant because they cook for us, they have expertise in cooking dishes we am not competent to prepare and wash the dishes. Alternatively, we could buy groceries and utensils, learn a recipe, cook it.

The same is true for electric utilities. We could buy a generator (or solar panels)., maintain it, provision it with gas and produce our electricity. Or we could contract with the local utility to deliver electrical power at a certain price and availability. They buy generators, maintain them and do all the necessary activities to ensure electrical service is available.

In both cases, we benefit from their service. This base definition works at the common sense level.

Next, we need to extend this definition and formalize the roles.

A service always has at least two participants: a performer offering to perform one or more task or activities to a certain specification, and a customer willing to either accept the offered specification of the work or to request and specify the work.

In this definition, a service is either offered to a customer or requested by a customer. Alternatively, we could say, without a customer involved, the performance of those tasks is not a service—The customer needs to either specify the work or specify what work they want performed.

Back to the restaurant example, when we go to McDonald’s we agree to accept the specification to a Big Mac without too many changes – maybe we can ask to remove the sauce. But we can’t ask for the Big Mac to be made with filet mignon. Nor can we ask for a hot dog – not available.

We could go to Burger King and order a Whopper without mayonnaise or onions, add mustard. Burger King does allow for more customization, but it’s still a within the burger category.

The specification, requested or offered, needs to include:

Terms and conditions of the work to be performed, including minimally time for fulfillment of the performance, benefit, and an exchange of value for the work performed

Terms and conditions are the specifications that make a service offer or request finite and set boundaries to the performance of the service and set the expectations of the benefit for the service. In IT services, terms and conditions are sometimes referred to as a Service Level Agreements (SLA) but
SLA
is both less and more. Terms and conditions may include a large number of elements—when we talk about IT services, we will have many detailed specifications. But even a travel service is governed by complex SLA’s—just look at the back of a typical ticket. One different between “T&Cs” and SLA’s is that SLA generally imply making the term and conditions observable, measurable and actionable.

Time. Without the notion of time, explicit or implicit, a service is nonsensical. When wills the hamburger be delivered? What time is installer arriving? The customer needs to know. How long do we have to deliver? The performers need to know too.

Sometimes, time is implicit: at the fast food restaurant, the burger seems to arrive soon or now--why bother specifying time? But in reality franchisees are trained to deliver orders in 1 minute, they are measured and the franchise is graded based on those metrics.

What’s implicit for a customer is not for the performer. For more complex services, time explicitness is critical. Time for response, for completion, for communicating major milestones and breakdowns need to be defined and communicated—or the service experience breaks down in acrimony, misunderstanding and distrust.

Benefit. A service provides a benefit that helps or profits a customer. The service takes care of a concern, worry, want, requirement, or need. It is this expectation of benefit that often causes the biggest disconnect between customers and performers. The customer expects certain benefit, but the performer is focused on activities. A service is different than a pure task because of the expectation of benefit. The benefit of a service needs to be articulated clearly, quantified, and qualified in a way that both parties can each objectively understand what is to be achieved by the service. Often benefits are implicit which is ok for well understood services such as restaurant service, but need to be made explicit for complex services such as IT.

Exchange of Value. For a service to be considered a service, rather than an activity, it must have some value for the customer, and because the customer gets value some exchange needs to take place. This doesn’t mean necessarily only monetary financial transaction need occur; it could be accounting charges to cost centers. But there needs to be a clear financial cost to the customer and a clear financial benefit to the service provider. If a service is always free, without consequence to the customer, then that service will be over-consumed which will cause diminish the availability and quality of that service to other customers. We like to call this soviet monopoly services, because “it’s free, but we don’t have any.”

This is difficult to do in some organizations, so a way to think of this attribute is that there is a strong form and a weak form of value exchange. In the strong form, there’s a direct financial correlation between both the customer and the performer and the benefit and the value. In a weak form, the customer and performer are not connected directly. Examples of this occur when there’s an intermediary buying the service (think government, healthcare) or the value is non-financial. Either approach is ok, but your service quality will be affected by the weak form.

My colleague Bill Fine, Troy Du Moulin and I are writing a book on Service Catalog we plan to bring out in September. The exercise of writing a book has been great for clarifying concepts and extending others. I wanted to share this excerpt that Bill sent to me over the weekend. I liked the clarity of the three roles a service catalog should play. Enjoy!

------Excerpt-------

Now that we have established what a Service is, we need to turn our attention to why the definition of Service Offerings, IT Services, Service Activities, Service Resources and IT Systems is a relevant and meaningful exercise. In other words, for the sake of what are we proposing that organizations engage in the exercise of cataloging their services? The answer is that Service Catalogs can and should drive value in your organization on multiple levels. From our perspective an effective Service Catalog should be:

Constitutive, in that it defines what IT does and does not do, and on what terms;

Actionable, in that it provides the means by which IT and its customers coordinate and conduct business; and

Governing, in that the key terms, conditions and controls defined in the Service Catalog are integrated into the service delivery processes of the organization.

The Constitutive Nature of the Service Catalog

By choosing the word “constitutive” to describe one attribute of an effective Service Catalog we purposefully intend to invoke the notion of a constitution of sorts for IT:

“We the people (of IT), in order to form a more perfect union (alignment with the business), establish justice and insure domestic tranquility…”

The basic act of setting to paper what it is that the IT organization does, and just as importantly what IT doesn’t do, in the form of a Service Catalog provides the structure around which a set of loosely related technical and functional IT silos can be organized into an effective and integrated IT organization. A good Service Catalog becomes the source of truth or cornerstone for defining what it is that IT is in business to do, who its customers are, and how the different parts of IT need to be organized to work together to deliver value to those customers. If the CMDB is the system of record for what IT did, then the Service Catalog becomes the system of record for what IT does.

Drawing again from our restaurant analogy, the contents of the Service Catalog define what kind of restaurant you are and what your customers can expect. Do you serve Chinese or Italian food, or both? Are you a self-service buffet or do you provide white linens and candle light? Are you cheap and fast or expensive and high quality? Of course there are restaurants of all sorts, and which one we as consumers select depends on our individual tastes and concerns at particular time. Similarly in the world of IT, there are many possible ways to “prepare and serve” IT services. The question is which styles of which services are right for a particular organization at a particular time. The power of a well articulated and communicated Service Catalog is that it gives an IT organization a way to dialog with its customers to find the mix of service breadth and quality that best fits the needs of the business. The Service Catalog, then, becomes the vehicle through which the elusive goal of business and IT alignment is hashed out.

Beyond business and IT alignment, knowing what kind of food you are expected to serve up front, at what level of quality and at what price, allows an IT organization to optimize its back end delivery processes. Are you optimizing for quality or speed? Do you need to server blackberries for desert (and blackberry servers, support technicians and additional help desk staff) or not? In order to optimize a process or organizational structure one needs to know that what one is optimizing for is in line with what the organization’s customers value. The Service Catalog should provide the mechanism to define and agree with your customers what it is that they want so that the IT organization can optimize its delivery processes and organization to provide just that.

The Service Catalog is, then, a critical first step in ensuring that IT services align with the business unit’s needs. By establishing a standard set of service offerings, with associated service levels and costs – and then publishing that information to the internal customers of IT – the IT organization can leverage market forces to manage demand for services. IT can become more demand-driven, based on informed customer requests for pre-defined service offerings, and thus improve alignment.

A customer-focused IT Service Catalog provides the basis for a balanced, business level discussion on trade-offs regarding the cost of service and the quality of service. The result is an ongoing conversation between the customer and the service provider that delivers greater value to both sides, ensuring higher customer satisfaction and superior SLA compliance. Customer demand then drives actions and choices and thereby produces alignment.

The Actionable Nature of the Service Catalog

One complaint we often hear, from IT organizations earnestly attempting to define their services and related delivery processes around what matters most to its customers, is that teams charged with building a Service Catalog have difficulty getting the business to engage with them on the definition and creation of a Service Catalog. One such team told us once that they could serve “champagne and caviar” at brown bag lunches and still not be able to get the interest of the true business customer.

The reality is that while IT services are becoming ever more critical to the day to day functioning of business, for the most part business customers don’t want to think about most IT services. They want it to be like the electricity in the building. It should just work. And, like the electricity costs, not hit my budget. They don’t have the time nor the inclination to attend meetings to talk about the trade-offs between availability metrics and costs, for example. You most likely only have their attention when they are looking to IT to deliver a new project or service, or when they are pulling together their budgets and looking for ways to squeeze money out of their fixed cost allocations. Similarly, your end users tend only to seek out IT when they have a break down – when they either need something to do their job or when something they need to do their job is broken.

The Governing Nature of the Service Catalog

As should be obvious by now, we do not see the Service Catalog as simply a written document, but rather as a key enabler of various front office and back office processes. In the balance of this section we will examine the relationship between the Service Catalog and the development and maturation of the various processes and practices that IT organizations are striving to put in place in order to run more like a business.

Key among the processes modern IT organizations are implementing are the ITIL Service Support and Service Delivery processes, with particular emphasis on Change and Configuration Management. As the importance, business criticality, complexity and interdependence of systems and devices that IT provides and supports grows, it is becoming imperative that IT develop mature, cross-function processes for tracking and managing infrastructure changes, so that critical systems and devices don’t fail. In this context we see the Service Catalog and the CMDB as something like two sides of the same coin, bound together by the Service Level Management and Change processes.

My colleague Bill Fine, Troy Du Moulin and I are writing a book on Service Catalog we plan to bring out in September. The exercise of writing a book has been great for clarifying concepts and extending others. I wanted to share this excerpt that Bill sent to me over the weekend. I liked the clarity of the three roles a service catalog should play. Enjoy!

------Excerpt-------

Now that we have established what a Service is, we need to turn our attention to why the definition of Service Offerings, IT Services, Service Activities, Service Resources and IT Systems is a relevant and meaningful exercise. In other words, for the sake of what are we proposing that organizations engage in the exercise of cataloging their services? The answer is that Service Catalogs can and should drive value in your organization on multiple levels. From our perspective an effective Service Catalog should be:

Constitutive, in that it defines what IT does and does not do, and on what terms;

Actionable, in that it provides the means by which IT and its customers coordinate and conduct business; and

Governing, in that the key terms, conditions and controls defined in the Service Catalog are integrated into the service delivery processes of the organization.

The Constitutive Nature of the Service Catalog

By choosing the word “constitutive” to describe one attribute of an effective Service Catalog we purposefully intend to invoke the notion of a constitution of sorts for IT:

“We the people (of IT), in order to form a more perfect union (alignment with the business), establish justice and insure domestic tranquility…”

The basic act of setting to paper what it is that the IT organization does, and just as importantly what IT doesn’t do, in the form of a Service Catalog provides the structure around which a set of loosely related technical and functional IT silos can be organized into an effective and integrated IT organization. A good Service Catalog becomes the source of truth or cornerstone for defining what it is that IT is in business to do, who its customers are, and how the different parts of IT need to be organized to work together to deliver value to those customers. If the CMDB is the system of record for what IT did, then the Service Catalog becomes the system of record for what IT does.

Drawing again from our restaurant analogy, the contents of the Service Catalog define what kind of restaurant you are and what your customers can expect. Do you serve Chinese or Italian food, or both? Are you a self-service buffet or do you provide white linens and candle light? Are you cheap and fast or expensive and high quality? Of course there are restaurants of all sorts, and which one we as consumers select depends on our individual tastes and concerns at particular time. Similarly in the world of IT, there are many possible ways to “prepare and serve” IT services. The question is which styles of which services are right for a particular organization at a particular time. The power of a well articulated and communicated Service Catalog is that it gives an IT organization a way to dialog with its customers to find the mix of service breadth and quality that best fits the needs of the business. The Service Catalog, then, becomes the vehicle through which the elusive goal of business and IT alignment is hashed out.

Beyond business and IT alignment, knowing what kind of food you are expected to serve up front, at what level of quality and at what price, allows an IT organization to optimize its back end delivery processes. Are you optimizing for quality or speed? Do you need to server blackberries for desert (and blackberry servers, support technicians and additional help desk staff) or not? In order to optimize a process or organizational structure one needs to know that what one is optimizing for is in line with what the organization’s customers value. The Service Catalog should provide the mechanism to define and agree with your customers what it is that they want so that the IT organization can optimize its delivery processes and organization to provide just that.

The Service Catalog is, then, a critical first step in ensuring that IT services align with the business unit’s needs. By establishing a standard set of service offerings, with associated service levels and costs – and then publishing that information to the internal customers of IT – the IT organization can leverage market forces to manage demand for services. IT can become more demand-driven, based on informed customer requests for pre-defined service offerings, and thus improve alignment.

A customer-focused IT Service Catalog provides the basis for a balanced, business level discussion on trade-offs regarding the cost of service and the quality of service. The result is an ongoing conversation between the customer and the service provider that delivers greater value to both sides, ensuring higher customer satisfaction and superior SLA compliance. Customer demand then drives actions and choices and thereby produces alignment.

The Actionable Nature of the Service Catalog

One complaint we often hear, from IT organizations earnestly attempting to define their services and related delivery processes around what matters most to its customers, is that teams charged with building a Service Catalog have difficulty getting the business to engage with them on the definition and creation of a Service Catalog. One such team told us once that they could serve “champagne and caviar” at brown bag lunches and still not be able to get the interest of the true business customer.

The reality is that while IT services are becoming ever more critical to the day to day functioning of business, for the most part business customers don’t want to think about most IT services. They want it to be like the electricity in the building. It should just work. And, like the electricity costs, not hit my budget. They don’t have the time nor the inclination to attend meetings to talk about the trade-offs between availability metrics and costs, for example. You most likely only have their attention when they are looking to IT to deliver a new project or service, or when they are pulling together their budgets and looking for ways to squeeze money out of their fixed cost allocations. Similarly, your end users tend only to seek out IT when they have a break down – when they either need something to do their job or when something they need to do their job is broken.

The Governing Nature of the Service Catalog

As should be obvious by now, we do not see the Service Catalog as simply a written document, but rather as a key enabler of various front office and back office processes. In the balance of this section we will examine the relationship between the Service Catalog and the development and maturation of the various processes and practices that IT organizations are striving to put in place in order to run more like a business.

Key among the processes modern IT organizations are implementing are the ITIL Service Support and Service Delivery processes, with particular emphasis on Change and Configuration Management. As the importance, business criticality, complexity and interdependence of systems and devices that IT provides and supports grows, it is becoming imperative that IT develop mature, cross-function processes for tracking and managing infrastructure changes, so that critical systems and devices don’t fail. In this context we see the Service Catalog and the CMDB as something like two sides of the same coin, bound together by the Service Level Management and Change processes.